HTC ThunderBolt – one of the worst gadgets Steve Wozniak ever bought

0.phoneArena
21 Aug 2012, 02:31posted on

Remember the HTC ThunderBolt? Boy, how much hype surrounded its release! After all, it was Verizon's first LTE smartphone and was capable of reaching some pretty impressive data transfer speeds. But then came the occasional network outages and overheating issues, not to mention that the LTE radio turned out to be a battery hog. In other words, the ThunderBolt had its fair share of flaws that early adopters had to deal with...

uhhmmm no... they are not smart and honest.. if they are honest... why they want to destroy one's name just to make any other gadget better... like "who cares about the iPhone?! s3 is better" have they forgotten that iPhone 4/4s was so last year?!

they dont even want nokia and blackberry to rise again.. they want nokia to go android...they hate nokia and blackberry for being delay, now that they are advancing, they hate it...

iPhone has its strengths that android,Windows Phone and BlackBerry doesnt have, android has its strengths that iphone doesnt have, Windows Phone has its strengths that android,iPhone and BlackBerry doesnt have, BlackBerry has its strengths that android,Windows Phone and iphone doesnt have

i just want them to shut their freaking mouth and be happy to each platform we all choose...

My iPod Nano 6G...Horrible sound, horrible price (and I bought it at a discounted price!). I ended up buying an amplifier to make the sound sound "fuller". The worst part about it is when I see my sister's Sony MP3 which cost half the price and the audio quality on stock headphone is double that of my iPod on Audio Technica earpieces.

8.wendygarett (unregistered)

They asked what was my worst gadget I ever bought, and I'm answering. I would do the same if the MP3 was from Sony or some other brand, but I doubt I would be so pissed as they wouldn't charge such a premium price for such a piece of crap.

Half the people coming in for earbuds are looking to replace their Apple earbuds. I usually sell them Gumys by JVC because they're cheap and work amazing, and the white ones look like the Apple earbuds anyway.

Considering I've had 2 pairs that have lasted 2 years apiece with amazing sound quality, and that I hear nothing but complaints about the Apple earbuds (you know, from the people coming in to get something different almost immediately because they suck so bad) I would say you are 100 percent, undiluted, pure wrong.

Why do you have this need to argue with me even when taking the opposite position makes you look like a complete fool?

Verizon rushed this phone out and many of the early LTE devices were bad. HTC Thunderbolt, Droid Charge(was the worst of them IMO), and the LG Revolution. All had horrible problems. Hell, the Bionic got completely cancelled and rebooted and took several extra months just to be decent but then a couple months later we got the RAZR anyway. So if you ask me, he's not off at all. It was a rushed, buggy, disaster.

You look at the current line up of LTE devices and the poor fools who still use the old ones and you can see them turn green with envy. My roommate couldn't wait to buy my Galaxy Nexus off me. He went through 4-5 different Droid Charges.

The alpha lineup of LTE devices was one of two big reasons why my friends and I ended up skipping Verizon when it came time to move them off of US Cellular. (The other reason was AT&T had better coverage at their cabin) They were horribly expensive and not very good. At the time, AT&T had the Inspire and Atrix for 100 and the Captivate for 25. All phones that, except for LTE, were either as good as or better than the Verizon lineup, and at half the price.

These days the LTE devices are excellent on all the carriers, and battery life seems to have improved even on the Verizon ones. I can't wait to see what the next crop of phones brings as well.

my old phone driod x, deffinately should have gotten an iphone 4. I tried andriod, it was good for a while, but when the time comes it was broken I can never find a place to repair it. And when i can find a repair shop they gave me a price, that i get a new phone for the same price.....

Yes but consumers words go further than just instore experience. A lot of people have reported problems with the Droid X after using for a long period of time. You automatically assumed the guy was possibly lying yet you know nothing about him or the issues on his phone.

Do you know how many times I see idiots trying to con the stores and claim their "screen just stopped working" just for them to be able to see the customer damaged it by the internal cracks in the screen?

Don't get me wrong, Droid X had a lot of problems with software but that doesn't mean its broken. However many consumers refer a device to be broken when its really just a bad software problem. It still works but they are pissy it doesn't run as smooth and nice as today's phones do.

Save up some cash and upgrade already. You got amazing devices now from Samsung, Motorola, and HTC.

That's a good question. I'm usually pretty good at picking them. However, I would say the prize went to a Compaq Presario that I bought back in February of 2009. Not only did it run on Vista (which was bad enough) but it only had 2 gigs of RAM, half of which was always being used by Vista. This made it utterly useless for any games that weren't already about 4 or 5 years old. The worst part was probably the fan, though. The f**king idiots who designed it made the vent face mostly downward, which meant that if you had anything directly underneath the fan, you were screwed because it would overheat in an hour (cut that to about ten minutes if you were playing a game). I usually used the computer with it on my lap, which meant that I had to keep my legs apart and prop it on my lap JUST SO so that the fan was clear. Also it only had 2 USB ports. Also the hard drive died after less than 2 years.

My Dell that I have right now is kind of crappy too. It's bulky by pretty much any standard these days, doesn't have a number pad, and the touchpad broke within a month. The hard drive died on me a couple of months ago as well. The fan design is way better though. It also has 3 USB ports, which is enough, although all the ports are on the left, which sucks because my power strip is to the right in the room where I use it.

On the plus side, it was upgradeable, and I ended up doubling the RAM and slapping a bigger hard drive in for a combined total of, like, 90 bucks.

Since I still have the Compaq, I may resurrect it so my nephew and I can try installing Linux on it, as kind of a learning computer. He wants to learn about techy stuff like that, and I want to as well, but I don't want to sacrifice a "main" computer in case we screw something up.

On the flip side of things, the best gadget I've owned so far has to go to my Droid X. The screen was nice and big, I loved the social networking widget, and the damn. Thing. Wouldn't. Break.

I must have dropped it about 40 times, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, JUST to show that it wouldn't shatter like an iPhone. I also got great signal and never dropped a call. Sure, once in a great while it froze up (a problem solved by Gingerbread) and the initial Gingerbread update resulted in the keyboard being f**ked up, but overall I had a great experience with it. In fact, my dad uses it to this day for his business. Not bad for a phone that's already 2 years old.

My Atrix has shown strong legs as well. I've been running ICS from a customized Cyanogenmod 9 ROM built by Jokersax, and it's done really well. I also use the lapdock to take notes in class, because its small size and light weight make it a much better choice to lug around than the Dell. I just downloaded the CM10 rom tonight, but had to revert because the lapdock functionality is broken on it so far.

Once the lapdock functionality is running on 10, though, I'm flashing that s**t back on, because Jelly Bean with Google Now is AMAZING. I can't wait to get it back on there, honestly.

My other favorite gadget is the first cell phone I ever bought: the Motorola V195S. That phone could survive anything, it had insane battery life, and was great at receiving signal. By insane battery life, by the way, I meant that with a decent amount of usage for a first time user, the battery would last a MONTH when I first got it. With much increased usage by the time I upgraded (lots of web usage) that shortened to 3 to 4 days, but I know its standby time was at least 8 days even at 2 years, because I lost the phone for that time period, during which it was never turned off, and the battery indicator was still full when I got it back.

My Motorola Cliq was also nice, but keys on the keyboard ended up not working very well after a while, and it WAS pretty slow. Overall a good effort by Moto for their first Android phone. It got me hooked, anyway.

The Thunderbolt was bad out of the box. However, once we got S-off, and custom kernels and roms, it became a pretty nice device. Especially when it got Gingerbread. My Thunderbolt with either SoaB from Team BAMF or Eternity from Team Virus, was as smooth as my current SGS3 and battery life was more than double stock.

Oh, as for the worst device (that I expected to be a nice device), was the Cowon Q5w. It never lived up to its hype, and they just stopped upgrading the firmware after a year, while they kept supporting the international version long after.

Of course, I've bought plenty of cheapo devices from crap brands, but I didn't expect those to be good.

I guess I am one of a few who really liked my Thunderbolt. It had issues here and there but seemed to level on out after updates. And it was a battery hog for sure but so were many of the first LTE phones.

Conversely, might I add that I am SO GLAD I ignored the account manager for the Verizon stores I worked at and never got a Blackberry. Those things are always a pain in the ass to work with. Almost nothing in the way they are laid out makes any sense. I've factory reset them about fifteen times in the past year for customers, and I STILL barely remember how to get to the function. Also, setup is a pain in the d**k.

Hell, Samsung's Galaxy S 2 even skipped all of that to begin with and just took you to the main screen. As long as you aren't on Sprint with their FIFTEEN GODDAMN STEP ACTIVATION PROCESS you can use the phone inside of about 30 seconds.

HTC One M9 camera review: Exploring every corner of the Sense camera app

All content (phone reviews, news, specs, info), design and layouts are Copyright 2001-2015 phoneArena.com. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part or in any form or medium without written permission is prohibited! Privacy . Terms of use . Cookies . Team